


Crude Desperation

by icarus_chained



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Comrades in Arms, Escape, Friendship, Gen, Kidnapping, Spies & Secret Agents, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 16:36:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1148256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony & Natasha have a somewhat lethal encounter as they escape an enemy base.</p><p>This is a fragment of what was meant to be the 2nd chapter of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/515759">Door Knockers</a>. I'm still not sure when/if I'll get back to that one, so I thought I'd post up the fragment just to taste?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crude Desperation

Natasha had registered the disturbance behind her on the liberated guard radio. She'd been out of the guard-post and already moving back the way she'd come before the call even finished relaying. That one of the prisoners had been discovered. That they'd apprehended him, and were bringing him back to the cell.

 _Stark_. Half an hour. That's all she'd asked. Stay low for half an hour, while she got the lay of the land. For the love of ...

But it wasn't his fault. She knew that, even as she ducked rapidly along corridors towards him. Stark had protested, just the once, and more by rote than anything. He'd known she was right, that he hadn't the training, that they needed to know what was what before they did anything. He'd agreed to hide for just the half-hour, while she ran a quick recce, and Natasha knew he hadn't jeopardised that out of some misplaced sense of pride. She trusted him that much.

Whatever else Stark was, he genuinely wasn't the idiot he pretended to be most of the time.

There were voices ahead of her. Three, she thought, all male. At least one climbing high in rough, brutal agitation. Stark. Had to be. Only Tony could make someone that mad that fast. She came to a stop, dropping back behind an intersection. Fools rush in, and bigger ones do so while making targets of themselves at the same time. Natasha wasn't a fool. 

"Stop _dragging_ , so help me, I'll cut your feet off and _carry_ you, you piece of -!"

"Then _do_ it already! Just pick the little shit up. The other one's still out there, and we don't have time for this bullshit."

Hnh. So they were in physical contact. And Stark was dragging his heels. Trying to stay close enough to where she'd left him, trying to stay in range until her time limit ran out. Huh. Not bad, Tony. Not too bad at all.

"Gentlemen," she interrupted, swinging around the corner, leading with the heavy pistol she'd 'liberated' along with the radio. Heavier than her usual, almost annoyingly so, but not unmanageable. And it did make a nice introduction, nose-first.

They half turned to her, both of them, partially unbalanced trying to haul a recalcitrant Tony Stark between them. A situation that got considerably worse when Tony, the second he recognised her, dropped heavily against their arms while they were in motion, pulling both of them back and off balance. And then, in the same moment her first shot rang out, he raised his freed left hand, a weird wrapped mass of silver grey, and pressed it viciously to the lower back of the second man.

Natasha blinked a little as the suddenly ex-captor arced away from the contact point, mouth dropping open in a silent scream as veins bulged across his face. He dropped the second Tony pulled his hand back, falling prone beside his equally incapacitated partner.

Tony looked up at her, fine white lines creasing around his eyes in vague distress, and shrugged.

"Sorry. I'd have done it sooner, but they sent another three off at the last intersection, and I wasn't sure when you were planning to show up."

Natasha lowered her pistol, safetying it automatically, and stepped cautiously forward to offer him a hand up. Checking, in passing, that the other two were as dead as they seemed to be. Tony blinked for a second, then took her hand with his apparently non-lethal one and heaved himself laboriously to his feet. 

She held out her free hand, once he was steady, and raised a single questioning eyebrow. And Stark, looking for all the world like a pickpocket caught red-handed, slowly held out his left hand and turned it palm up for her examination.

He'd wrapped it up in electrical tape. That was what the silver grey had been. Insulation, against the jury-rigged wires running back up along the length of his arm and under his shirt to his chest. To the reactor, then. A portable battery, if need be. And nestled in the center of his palm, an ugly little plastic-and-metal button, was something that looked for all the world like down 'n' dirty joy buzzer. One apparently capable of delivering a lethal payload.

Natasha ... bit her lip, feeling the humour crease her mouth entirely against her will, and looked up to meet his eyes. His mouth was twitching faintly too.

"... Crude," she opinioned, casually. Holding the silver-wrapped hand in hers, carefully not grinning. 

He bared his teeth, a flash of humour and viciousness all at once. "Hey. Give me three months and the contents of a terrorist armoury, you get the Iron Man. Twenty minutes in a maintenance closet, you get crude." And there was fear in his eyes, as he said it, but there was courage too, and humour, and a vicious streak so wide she had to delight in it.

He would never have made a good assassin, or much of a good spy, either. Too much uncontrolled emotion, too much leaping before he looked. But with his skills, she thought the run before he imploded would have been _spectacular_.

There was a sound from the corridor behind him, back towards the next intersection. The distant sound of boots, of a panic beginning to spread. Three more, he'd said. Three more in the group that had captured him. And her reconnaissance had given a full base complement of closer to fifty. Once those three got off an alarm, they'd have a lot more problems to deal with, in very short order. 

She looked at him, then. Found him looking back at her, his ear cocked towards those approaching footsteps and that perfect mix of terror and anger and blind, cheerful determination in his dark eyes. He grinned desperately at her, dark and ready, and slowly, surely, she felt her lips curl in return.

"Shall we?" she offered quietly, her hand tightening for a moment around his weaponised one, around the crude, lethal desperation of him. There was a flash from his palm in response, a spark from the jury-rigged shocker as he flexed his hand, and the black amusement rolled like joy through her chest.

"Yes," said Tony Stark, her partner in crime, on a bright sneer of challenge. "Yes, Agent Romanov, I think we shall."


End file.
